Dovetail's Flight Sim World

Back over some desert-ish area with some farmland… I will say, at least in clear or partly cloudy skies, I can run 8x time accel smooth as butter at 30 FPS…

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Coming up near Lake Oroville (the dam that had all those problems a few months back)…decided to alter course toward the coast and probably land before I reach my flightplanned destination of Mammoth Lakes, CA…

Dropped into Oakland after 2.4 hours of flying or so… Fairly nice scenery with regards to ortho-type overlays. Looks great from mid to high…breaks down a bit as you go lower for obvious reasons…

That’s about all for tonight… Hope I gave some good looks at what is within. Will check out more this weekend!

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Alright, many thanks for the screens! So you only had that one single CTD?

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Does it beat ETS2 in VR? :wink:

Yes, only one.

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The hills look nice.

This is curious - there doesn’t appear to be any illumination of the runway by the landing lights. At least, none that I can figure out. And cockpit lighting is taken directly from FSX - meaning it is still ON/OFF with no variable intensity, and generally far inferior to what X-Plane is capable of.

It looks like additional weather configuration options are planned. A real weather option would be nice…

So I wanted to try out some IFR flying. The planes are definitely works in progress - with some having less bugs than others. Borrowing heavily from FSX (well, almost totally), the control schemes for the knobs and stuff are the same…kind of frustrating to deal with in the virtual cockpit trying to find the click spots. Some planes, like the Malibu, I’ll be darned if I could find a way to get the altitude preselect to work correctly…but other planes such as the Diamond everything works pretty well.

I set up a short flight to shoot an ILS approach to 36R at my home airport of Charlotte. The DA40 Diamond Star is a pretty good IFR platform with a nice autopilot, nice displays, and the Garmin allows you to load ILS/LOC/RNAV approaches.The panel looks pretty nice too…in the fog, I was showing 16 FPS…it seems weather depiction is a hard hit, because otherwise I’m showing a smooth 30 FPS.

Descending into the murk, the cockpit actually brightened - again, something is funky with the lighting/HDR…but it didn’t totally kill immersion…

The fog/clouds are actually very well done in this scenario (the “fog” setting) and there is a nice feeling of flying in the fog and the terrain blends nicely into it. Very well done actually…

The VASI lights tend to bleed through the clouds just a smidge earlier than you might expect…but otherwise, it was a legit feeling ILS. The DA40 caught and tracked the ILS just fine on the autopilot, though perhaps not quite as precise and crisp as one would expect…it let the needle track a half a dot width out initially, even though I set up a shallow intercept angle and 80 knots…but heck, real planes do that sometimes too…

Breaking out…nice transition to the visual landing. Another thing to keep in mind about FSW - there is only civil GA traffic like J-3 Cubs around the airports. No airliners, no business jets, just GA stuff. Again…early access…who knows what the plan is…

Here you can see all the AI J-3s lined up to taxi out for departure…

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Is it really 64 bit?

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I don’t know…how can I tell? LOL…

I was going to say, “Where is the executable located, \Program Files\ or \Program Files (x86)?” But it’s a Steam App, so launch Task Manager and on the Details tab, right-click one of the columns, click Select columns, and check the Platform box.

Looks like 64-bit… @chipwich

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I feel better now :smile:

Pretty ironic, I just got the out of memory CTD in P3D.

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Is it me or does the aircraft cast no shadow on the ground?

Last time I was in Sedona, the ground was a bit more orange?

Thanks for the write ups on this one @BeachAV8R.

Not sure if i can pry my wallet open for this at the moment.

Slightly confused about all the rehashes of fsx that is about. We have fsx, fsx SE, p3d and now fsw.

Fsx to me was horribly flawed in a lot of areas such as multiplayer where atc and ai traffic were unable to function. Flight model was sparse outside of standard flight parameters with the usual glitches bugs and Oom problems.

So the big question on FSW for me is, “Do i want to invest in a sim based on flawed standard hoping they have plugged the holes?”

I mean you can giftwrap a poo many many times, but inside, its still a poo.

So is FSW a giftwrapped poo?

I wouldn’t actually. If you were a brand spanking new simmer, I think it is a nice product because it introduces you to the basics, gives you a nice world to fly over with improved ground scenery, 64-bit, seems pretty smooth in most areas. BUT…it suffers from instant expandability (which I’d argue is not all that important if you really are BRAND new to sims), and is somewhat locked down externally. I have been reading posts online that people are able to import some of their FSX aircraft into it, so the base product of FSX is still there and can probably be modded, but really it looks like the front end for Dovetail content…which might not be a bad thing, but might not really fit with the power user type simmer.

It could be. While X-Plane has been making leaps and bounds over the years, FSX has basically been getting improved by third party people, and those that adopt the code (Dovetail and Lockheed Martin) are giving some menu improvements, and going for other improvements, but you can always see the skeleton of FSX peeking through. Personally, I still think FSX: Steam Edition for $4.99 just as a stock program is one of the best values in gaming period. But for me, it’s just like when I fire up the latest version of Falcon 4 (BMS)…I hear that ATC voice and I still think…OK, that’s what this is…

TL;DR - X-Plane (IMHO) is way superior to FSW for our type…but might be a great entry level simmer. Maybe. Depends on if they put more game in the game and sim in the sim. They need both.

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I guess one way to look at it is from price point. It’s probably the worlds cheapest way to get full Orbx Global Textures/Vectors at the moment, as they come with it. :slight_smile:

I think it will live or die with the amount of 3rd party support it gets. They can try to ‘deprecate’ the existing FSX license they own (FSX gets renamed FSX Legacy!) but would be mad to as it does ok for DLC still, they could also go back to Microsoft and moan about that Lockheed P3D licenses not really being for non-entertainment users, but then they still have to purely compete with X-Plane on features.

The Steam workshop might be convenient, but flight simmers are fairly intransigent and 51% of them will see it as a bad thing compared to copying files (evil Gabe etc). The multiplayer and missions part could be really good, but then again, so many of FSX players don’t actually want to fly with others, so it wouldn’t be enough of a feature not to use XP11 or stay on P3D. For newcomers, I’m not even sure if that ‘casual flight simmer’ market is really that solid - their Flight School didn’t exactly do that well (being pulled from store even before this came out).

Yeah…it isn’t a perfect match for sure…but it is OK considering they do have to cover the world so to speak. Having spent a lot of time in Prescott, Flagstaff, Sedona, and all points between, it looks pretty good.